Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho

In Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white people are afraid to ask – yet which everyone needs the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series of the same name a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation and ‘reverse racism’.

Notes from, “Acho, Emmanuel. Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition.”

1. The Name Game: Black or African American?

Those advocating for the use of African-American over black criticized black as a label that was originally assigned by slave owners and also highlighted the links between black and sin, between black and dishonesty, between black and a lack of virtue, between black and a whole bunch of negative connotations. (Loc. 162)

BLACK COVERS THE descendants of the people who were brought over on slave ships and forced to work on plantations and also includes people like my parents, who immigrated to the United States. It covers all the black people in the United States and also joins them with people of African descent in Brazil, the Caribbean, Mexico (the diaspora), and other countries where the transatlantic slave trade brought Africans. It’s a descriptor of what black people all have in common. (Loc. 189)

The question of whether to use black or African American is ultimately a preference, one that helps a person present their identity to the world. Each person you meet might not have a preference, but maybe they do. Trust me, language matters. (Loc. 205)

2. What do you see when you see me? Implicit Bias

Back in 2015, Google’s rollout of its Photos app ran into a big, racist problem… One user, a black computer programmer named Jacky Alciné, found a serious bug: the app kept tagging him and his girlfriend as “gorillas.” (Loc.213)

The tag itself might seem funny until you remember that black people were long insulted as “apes” and “monkeys” and, yes, “gorillas”—all ways of saying “less than human.” (Loc. 218)

The short answer is that the facial recognition algorithm had been disproportionately coded to, and tested on, white faces. It didn’t recognize black faces because no one had thought to teach it to do so. The long answer is something called implicit bias. (Loc. 222)

In hospitals, bias can literally determine whether a person lives or dies. According to Eliminating Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Mortality, a 2019 report published by the Center for American Progress, black women across the income spectrum and from all walks of life are dying from preventable pregnancy-related complications at three to four times. (Loc. 252)

After trying and failing to fix the algorithm that labeled black people as gorillas, the company removed the gorilla label altogether. They’re still working on a better way to recognize the full spectrum of human faces. Therein lies a lesson for those of us who are not billion-dollar tech giants: it can be easier to avoid bad PR than to fix the root problem. In order for us to conquer our implicit biases, we have to speak openly and honestly about them. (Loc. 278)

Instead of being color blind, be introspective. Try to identify your prejudices and hold them up to scrutiny. (Loc. 289)

3. The False Start: White Privilege

This is white privilege in a nutshell: what we’ve done in America is said, “Okay, Emmanuel, you’re free to run.” Meanwhile, we’ve acted as if it’s been a fair race, when in all honesty, black people were held back for hundreds of years. And still are. (Loc. 310)

LBJ said it best: “You can’t shackle and chain someone for hundreds of years, liberate them to compete freely with the rest and still justly believe that you’ve been fair.” (Loc. 318)

And white privilege is about the word white, not rich. It’s having advantage built into your life. It’s not saying your life hasn’t been hard; it’s saying your skin color hasn’t contributed to the difficulty in your life. (Loc. 322)

4. Cite your Sources or Drop the Class: Cultural

Borrowing influences from black culture is not an issue in and of itself. The problem becomes when you borrow from a culture without citing the sources and/or knowing the history. As long as you do both of those things, you should be fine in most cases. (Loc. 415)

Cultural appropriation happens when members of a dominant group—in the United States, white people—take elements from the culture of a people who are disempowered. It’s problematic for a number of reasons. For one, it trivializes historic oppression. It also lets people show love for a culture while still remaining prejudiced toward the people of the culture and lets privileged people profit from the labor of oppressed people. On top of that, it can perpetuate racist stereotypes. (Loc. 433)

The key is to celebrate it as black culture—not to take it as your own. The discomfort comes in the gray areas, I know. Just trust me that asking more questions, doing more homework, is better than maybe plagiarizing any day. (Loc. 455)

5. The Mythical Me: Angry Black Men

This is the black man as overly aggressive, menacing, and physically threatening, especially to innocent white women. That stereotype has been prominent since at least 1915, when Hollywood produced its first blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation. At one point in the film, a black man proposes marriage to a white woman, and she runs and jumps off a cliff because she thinks he will rape her. Think about all the history that made that a reaction the filmmakers knew their audience would applaud. Not only did the film inspire the second coming of the KKK, it was also shown in the White House and impressed President Woodrow Wilson so much that he commented, “It’s like history written in lightning.” (Loc. 499)

The upshot of these stereotypes has been to allow what I think of as an ongoing “weaponizing of whiteness.” (Loc. 513)

Amy Cooper, who in early 2020 called the cops on a bird-watcher in Central Park because he wanted her to leash her illegally unleashed dog. When she dialed 911, she used three words that are almost a death sentence to black men: “There’s a black man who’s threatening my life.” That was a lie, and thank goodness the birder had the video receipts. (Loc. 517)

Names aside, they’re all Karen, the meme: an entitled white woman who throws tantrums, asks to speak to the manager, and sometimes calls for the cavalry against a supposed Angry Black Man. (Loc. 517)

6. NOOOOOPE! The N-Word

Let’s just get the basics out of the way right now: No. You can’t use “nigga,” or any other variation. There will never be any circumstances under which a white person should use the word nigger. Period. (Loc. 588)

Niger, nigger, nigga. The last version is the form of the word that black people have used to seize some of the power of the word, to turn something that was meant to harm into something that might just have the potential to heal. Nigga is a term of endearment between some black people—the softening of the hard ER is key, as is the fact that it’s reserved for intimate, black-to-black exchanges. (Loc. 606)

There is no conversation that excuses a white person using the word nigger. There’s too much pain in that word coming from a white mouth. However, I will also say that if you’re ever inclined to use it, you can and should investigate where that inclination or compulsion comes from. (Loc. 643)

7. The House Always Wins – Systemic Racism

In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams coined the term American dream, seen in the opening epigraph. I’m sure we can all agree that an America built on “opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” sounds like a pretty great place to live. But it’s a place that America has never been—especially for black people. (Loc. 685)

If you want to know the major reason America hasn’t lived up to the stated ideals of its Founding Fathers, and of Mr. James Truslow Adams, it’s due to a little thing called systemic (or structural or institutional) racism. (Loc. 691)

For starters, a definition: systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color. Those effects show up as inequalities in power, opportunities, laws, and every other metric of how individuals and groups are treated. Which is to say: systemic racism is making the unequal treatment of people of color the national norm. (Loc. 704)

Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in America. The oldest historically black college and university (HBCU) is Cheyney University, founded in 1837. So, there’s a two-hundred-year gap of higher education between white and black people. (Loc. 738)

According to a 2009 study by Northeastern University, high school dropouts are sixty-three times more likely to be incarcerated than college grads. You needn’t be a statistician to see a correlation between schools and prisons, one that’s now known as the school-to-prison pipeline… At about 13 percent of the U.S. population, black people make up more than one-third of those in federal and state prisons. That overrepresentation is not an accident but the product of systemic racism. (Loc. 749)

8. Shifting the Narrative – Reverse Racism

NOW THAT WE’VE expanded our definition of racism to include the systems that feed it, I’d like to address another supposed flavor: reverse racism, a.k.a. the idea of black people (or anyone nonwhite) being racist against white people. (Lo. 802)

What is reverse racism if it’s not, well, real? It’s a prime example of what scholar Alice McIntyre calls white talk: a.k.a. strategies white people use—consciously or not—to insulate themselves from their collective participation in racism. Another way into this idea is the term white fragility, popularized by sociologist Robin DiAngelo. When white people are put in situations that challenge their identity, “we withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore,” explains DiAngelo. “And in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium.” Put very simply—y’all get defensive. (Loc. 818)

I REPEAT: THERE is no such thing as reverse racism. If you want to oppress someone, you’re gonna need power over them as a group—and no group holds it over white people. There literally aren’t enough black people with institutional authority over white people to facilitate systemic racism against them. (Loc. 825)

In a nutshell, Affirmative Action is an effort to redress the systemic inequalities caused by centuries of discrimination. To try to achieve measures of social equality, it gives preferential treatment to groups that have suffered those long-standing inequalities. Some people argue that it’s unfair to now give black people preference and thereby treat white people unfairly. (Loc. 842)

When people proclaim that black lives matter, it’s not about saying white lives don’t matter. It is a given in this country that they do. What black people are really and truly saying is that black lives matter as well as white lives. (Loc. 883)

9. The Fix – Who’s Governing the Government

You might’ve heard of a little thing called the electoral college. Yes, the confounding institution that awarded the 2016 election to Donald Trump and the 2000 election to George W. Bush, despite their opponents winning the popular vote in each case. You might remember from civics class that the electoral college was created because, during the Constitutional Convention, the Founding Fathers thought ordinary Americans wouldn’t have enough information to make informed and intelligent voting decisions. While that may have been true, there was also another major factor being hashed out between those Northern and Southern delegates: what to do about five hundred thousand or so enslaved people. The result of that debate was what became known as the Three-Fifths Compromise. (Loc. 970)

In layman’s terms, the compromise counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of taxes and representation. That agreement gave the Southern states more electoral votes than if they hadn’t been counted at all, but fewer than if black people had been counted as a full person. And that political leverage paved the way for nine of the first twelve presidents being slave-owning Southerners. (Loc. 975)

Other strategies of voter suppression, a.k.a. the Fix, are state legislatures increasing or decreasing the number of polling stations in a given district, changing the times or days the stations are open, and even planting faulty machines in certain polling stations to slow them down. Another common tactic has been purging the registries of people who can vote. This is done by removing people from the voting registry who haven’t voted for a certain number of years or haven’t received a voting card mailed to their address. This more often targets black people and poor people who have unstable housing. (Loc. 1004)

And then there’s gerrymandering. This is when a state redraws the boundary of a voting district to negate certain votes. Two ways to do this: One is “packing,” where voters are clustered into a district predicted to be won by an oppositional party, so the extra votes are wasted on that party.

The other is “cracking,” when voters for a party are broken into multiple districts where the opposing candidate will win with a large majority, again wasting votes. One more election Fix that’s been getting attention: preventing people who’ve been convicted of a crime from voting. (Loc. 1010)

10. Thug Life – Justice for Some

THE WAY PEOPLE talk about gang violence and street crime, you’d think black people invented the whole shebang. The Crips and Bloods and Latin Kings are infamous for a reason, but the first gangs in America were actually white people, formed shortly after the Revolutionary War. (Loc. 1131)

You want to know the truth? Poverty, not race, is a more accurate predictor of who commits crimes. To the extent that black-on-black crime exists, it’s the product of, among other systemic factors I’ve discussed, segregated housing, concentrated poverty, and unequal schooling. According to the Bureau for Justice Statistics, people living in households with income below the federal poverty line are twice as likely to commit violent crime than high-income households, regardless of race. (Loc. 1153)

The bottom line: our criminal justice system too often treats black people like thugs instead of like people. So the cycle perpetuates, and both stereotypes and actual violence keep going and going and going. (Loc. 1191)

11. Picking up the Pieces – The Black Family Struggle

Following the Civil War, thousands of black people set out to reunite with their families, some of them crossing half a continent in searching. Hundreds placed advertisements in newspapers and sent letters to the Freedmen’s Bureau, searching for wives, husbands, children, and other family members who’d been sold off. (Loc. 1305)

Before I go any further, a few words on the worst of all arguments: that this is just how black families are. As if black people are genetically disposed to this brokenness. If broken families were in the nature of black people, how do we explain all those efforts in the wake of war? (Loc. 1315)

Take a look at your local newscast. Take note of how black people and people of color are being portrayed. I bet what you’ll see are extremes: athletes and entertainers portrayed as demigods, other black people portrayed as poor or violent or criminal… Today, as much as in 1968, Americans are told again and again of the broken black family, such that many white people believe it’s our natural state. Meanwhile, those messages erode the esteem of black people. (Loc. 1340)

12. Love Wins – The Interracial Family

“I don’t see color” is not an okay thing to say, because to say we’re all exactly the same is to gloss over a whole history and presence of inequality. (Loc. 1408)

Marriage between white people and black people was officially outlawed by Pace v. Alabama in 1883. In that infamous Supreme Court decision, the court unanimously upheld the conviction of a black man and white woman who’d been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for violating Alabama’s miscegenation law, setting a precedent for banning interracial marriages all over the country. (Loc. 1432)

Here’s my realest opinion: I believe a person should be able to love who they love. I believe that love wins. I believe a family can look however it looks and still be a family. With that in mind, some advice for treating everyone’s heart with care: If you’re going to be in a relationship with a black person, please don’t pick them because you think they’re exotic. (Loc. 1467)

A rock-bottom start: learn little things as culturally specific as how to play spades and dominoes; see classic films like The Wiz, School Daze, Malcolm X, and Coming to America, as well as more contemporary ones like Friday, The Wood, Love & Basketball, and Black Panther. Take them to a black barbershop or hair salon; stay awhile. (Loc. 1484)

13. Good Trouble – Fighting for Change

When you see people out protesting for George Floyd, or Ahmaud Arbery, or Breonna Taylor, or any of our beloved black people who have been murdered, what you’re seeing is a group of people who are angry… The LA protests weren’t defined by that group of dudes going down to Melrose any more than a stadium of one hundred thousand football fans is defined by the few who have a drunken brawl in the parking lot. (Loc. 1548)

And at no time in recent history has this been more collectively acknowledged than during the protests spurred by the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, among others, over the last few months. The New York Times estimates that between fifteen and twenty-six million people demonstrated over George Floyd’s death in the United States alone, making it the largest demonstration in the history of the country. (Loc. 1620)

You can also support efforts to defund the police. To clarify: defunding the police doesn’t mean abolishing the police, though there are more radical calls for that, too. It instead means redirecting money from police budgets to other government agencies funded by the city. Defunding the police could mean more money for underfunded schools, for mental health programs, or for drug recovery programs, all of which can help to reduce crime (Loc. 1694)

14. Your Presence is Requested – How to be an Ally

The simple version is that an ally is a person from an empowered group who acts to help an oppressed group, even if it costs them the benefits of their power… In America, allyship goes back to the white abolitionists, who, from the 1820s until the start of the Civil War, called on the American government to ban slavery. Arguably the most famous of these was William Lloyd Garrison, who became the head of the American Anti-Slavery Society and founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. (Loc. 1748)

A white savior is a white person who acts to help nonwhite people, but in a context that can be perceived as self-serving. A white savior is someone motivated by thinking something like this: I have to save black people, because without me, they won’t be able to save themselves. (Loc. 1782)

True allyship is a commitment to fight this fight for the long haul: long after it ceases to be a top-of-the-fold news item, long after the cameras have stopped capturing it. (Loc. 1793)

15. Breaking the Huddle – How to End Racism

Long ago, plenty of people believed that slavery would never end. Before 2008, plenty of people believed it was impossible for a man named Barack Hussein Obama to win the presidency. (Loc. 1889)

Let me tell you what the movement for racial equality can’t afford: white people being fragile about racial issues… This is not to say I want to intentionally hurt a white person’s feelings. On the contrary, I want to move us toward healing. (Loc. 1929)